Well this boat may sink but I'm not gonna rock it
by Amelia Strange
Summary: After TATM but before Snowmen: Amy doesn't end up in the same place as Rory when the Weeping Angel sends them back.
1. Chapter 1

She doesn't really know what happens when the Weeping Angel zaps her back – it's a strange, kind of out-of-body experience, but she's had a pretty good number of those from travelling with the Doctor. It's not all that surprising.

Amy strongly expects to see Rory waiting for her when she lands with a whump on the ground, but notices two very, very key things when she lands.

First of all – she certainly isn't in New York. No, New York doesn't have that many trees in the whole of the city, and there's not a castle – oh, there's a saltire flying at the castle.

She's in Scotland. Bloody Scotland, where she hasn't been for ages and ages (and it's been a really long time, and though she tries she has never, ever learned how to keep track of time when she and Rory are travelling with the Doctor). There is no positive indication of what year it might be, but it's recent enough that the castle that she's standing next to is in ruins. That's about a two to three hundred year range, which is completely and utterly unhelpful.

"Rory!" she yells, and her name echoes around the lake. She runs up the hill and stands by the castle ruins, eyes scanning the lake. _No, he can't be far, he probably ended up here too – he has to be waiting somewhere on the shore. He has to be! _

There's no answer to her first call, but Amy Pond is not someone who gives up easily. "Rory!" She shouts again, and it echoes through the woods, but there's no response.

The Doctor never explained that much about the Weeping Angels to her – aside from the fairly obvious no blinking – but he had never guaranteed that they would zap two people back to the same place or the same time.

_No. No, this cannot be happening. _

"Rory!" She yells, one last time, to no avail.

Apparently, she's now captured someone's attention, and an elderly man ambles up the hill and gives her a rather strange look.

"And what d'ya think yer doin 'ere?" He says in a Scottish accent so thick that she can barely understand him.

"I'm sorry," Amy says, trying her best to play up the Scottish, "but 'm a wee bit lost – ye haven't seen a young man with a white shirt and some blue jeans 'round here?"

He stares at her like she's got three heads.

"No," he replies, "and I don't know what yer doin' oot 'ere in those clothes, lass, but if ye want to have any decent company you ought to change."

Her heart starts pounding in her chest because something horrible is dawning on her at this moment. "If y'don't mind my asking, where are we?"

The man looks around, and then looks back at Karen with surprise. "Loch Ness! This 'ere's Urqhart Castle!"

_Right. Well, I'm definitely in Scotland. _"And, when are we?"

He struggles briefly with how to answer that question. "It's 1946. May, so the wind's not too bad!" He smiles. "Sunday, today is. 's why there's no one 'ere."

So she ends up nearly 56 years in the past, but without the person for whom she let herself get sent back for. Well.

"Sir," she says, "'m a little lost and very cold. D'ya think you could take me in 'til I find out where I'm meant to be goin'?"

The man nods. "Follow me. I'll take you home and get you some proper clothes."

Rory will show up. Rory's good at showing up.

* * *

Her stay with Hugh, the groundskeeper at Urqhart Castle, and Jane, his wife, starts out at two weeks, because, as she tells them, her husband is coming for her. Rory wouldn't leave, he wouldn't give up. Not like this. She gets caught on this insane hope, and since 1946 Inverness is an incredibly boring place, it's the only thing that keeps her going.

She writes and sketches too – pictures of the Doctor, and the TARDIS, but when Jane comes to ask her what they are, she realises that she can't without sounding like more of a total loony than she already does to Jane and Hugh.

"They're things out of my imagination," she says.

"Have you ever thought of writing books, young girl?" Jane says. "Woman aren't writing novels like men, but you could write for children!"

Amy nods.

Jane and Hugh don't have any children, and they're both getting on in years, and it drives Jane insane. Amy doesn't go out much, except with Jane to buy food and fabric to make clothes, so the two of them talk a lot.

She tells her, and Hugh when he's not taking care of the castle, about Rory and Leadworth and her old life, but a bit time-warped so that it seems like she's genuinely disoriented and confused rather than the kind of crazy that could get you locked up.

Six months in to her stay in Inverness, her resolve begins to flag and she starts to wonder whether Rory is actually going to come and find her.

She hears Jane and Hugh whispering one night from her bedroom.

"She's not right, Jane!" Hugh says. "All that natterin' on 'bout a man that's never goin' to come! We can't keep 'er 'ere! People are talkin'!"

"She's good company," Jane replies, "and I ain't turnin' 'er out. She got nowhere to go!"

The conversation ends there because Amy tries to get up and makes the floor creak. She assumes they keep talking, but she doesn't hear about it until it's nearly a year later and she's almost certain that Rory isn't going to come back, and that the Weeping Angel did its last bit of cruelty by not only separating her from the Doctor, but also by taking her away from Rory.

The only two people that she felt that actually loved her mostly unconditionally.

One year to the day that she landed on the shores of Loch Ness, Hugh and Jane sit Amy down at dinner.

"Dearie," Jane says, "we think it's time that you… spread yer wings a little."

Hugh nods. "Yer Rory – is it? He ain't comin' back. You know. We know."

Those words hurt Amy worse than anything ever possibly could, but she knows that at this point, it's probably true.

"My family," Jane says, a little hesitantly, "left me a flat in Edinburgh. We've got some money to give, and you've got your clothes and things, so we're going to send you there. You can sell your paintings, and your writings. You'll do fine, Amy."

She gets a couple of days to pack the small of personal possessions that she's acquired during her stay in Inverness, and then Hugh and Jane give her a hug and a kiss and drop her off at the train station to make her way to Edinburgh.

* * *

On the platform, just as the train pulls in, she catches sight of some very familiar curly blonde hair, and realises that if River's here, it generally doesn't mean good things.

River doesn't find her until an hour in to the train ride when the person sitting beside Amy vacates her seat, at which point she slinks out of nowhere and plops down beside her.

"Have you seen Rory?" Amy asks, because there isn't a whole lot else between the two of them at this point.

River nods, but doesn't say anything else.

"Well?" Amy says, trying to catch her attention.

"I'm not sure you're going to want to know the answer to that."

Her stomach falls, but for some reason she needs to know. This is closure for her. "River, tell me. Tell me the truth. Everything is just so screwed up right now, and I need to know if I'm going to see him again."

"He ended up in 1938, New York," she says. "He's married."

Her jaw drops.

"To another woman named Amelia."

_No. _

"And she's having a baby in about six months."

Amy begins to cry after that, because she misses Rory, and she is shocked, absolutely shocked, that he didn't feel the need to find her, or at least wait for her like he always does. Did. What's worse is that he found someone who could give him the one thing that she never could. The pain of her infertility had faded a little after she and Rory were briefly reunited in their normal time, but now it was back again full force.

"Amy, he thought you were dead," River says quietly, placing a hand on her shoulder. "I did too. We mourned. We all did. I tried and tried to find you, because I thought that I had people everywhere." She pauses, and looks down. "It turns out I don't."

Amy shakes her head and shrugs River's hand off of her shoulder. They sit in silence for a while and she watches the Scottish countryside zip by.

"And the Doctor?" Amy asks, once she's a little over the combination of sad and angry that was previously keeping her from doing much in the way of talking.

"I wrote him an afterword in your name," River says. "You lived happily with Rory until you both died."

"Except the Amelia Williams on that gravestone isn't me," Amy says bitterly.

"Sometimes with the Doctor," River says, sighing, "a lie's a bit better than the truth. He thinks you're gone, Amy. You know that if he finds you, he's going to lose you a second time, and that will not be good for him."

As much as she really hates River right now, she knows that she's entirely correct about that. She doesn't want to go through the pain of being separated from the Doctor again either. In a strange way, it's probably better that he never finds her.

River does as River does and completely melts in to the crowd without a proper goodbye as soon as they disembark in Waverley station. Amy collects her things, and shows a small piece of paper with the address of her new flat on it, and when he drops her off there she is please to discover that its location is relatively central. (She also notices a publishing house nearby, which she resolves to visit once she's finished the first draft of her book. The money that Jane and Hugh left won't last her for long, and she's got to find a way to make money that doesn't involve getting married, because she'll be damned if she does that again.)

The flat is airy and bright, and has a large window in the kitchen that looks over a small back garden.

"It'll do," Amy mutters as she unpacks her clothing in her bedroom. "It'll definitely do."

The publishing house that she drove by on her cab ride through Edinburgh rejects her book, as do two others before she finally finds someone that's willing to take a chance on single, female author. (She's forgotten a bit how much that mattered and how much she'd give almost anything for people not to look at her strangely when she tells them that she's not married. Or for a cellphone. She kind of misses that.)

The book, _Summer Falls, _is published with moderate success, and certainly enough that the publisher asks to write another as a sequel. With the money from the first printing, she buys herself a little table and chair for the back garden where she goes and draws when the weather's decent enough. There are times when she's out there that she hopes that a mysterious blue box will land in front her suddenly, but then she remembers – the Doctor isn't looking for her. He's hopefully found another person to travel with, because he changes when he's alone for too long.

(Even though he's never going to show up, she still waves up at the stars before she goes to sleep at night.)

Three years pass, and she becomes accustomed to living on her own, and starts to feel like she's properly leading a life.


	2. Chapter 2

There is nothing that is going to help him now, he knows this for a fact. Donna casually dropped in to the TARDIS after he was mourning for Rose, and that helped him keep moving until he properly recovered. This time, he has no one. Maybe someone dosed in huon particles will get zapped into the TARDIS, but if they did, he'd look at them apathetically and tell them that there's nothing he can do.

(Then he'd drop them back off on Earth somewhere, and bolt back into outer space and loneliness like he was on fire.)

He hangs out above Earth for a while, and sits like Brian once did, with a cup of tea and his feet dangling out in to open space. He wonders what Amy and Rory did with their lives – did they ever manage to have the child they so desired? Were they happy in the end?

He looks at the afterword sometimes, and wonders if it's true at all.

He furtively drops back in on Donna, and Martha and Mickey, who are all living fairly normal and productive lives, and breathes a quiet sigh of relief that he hasn't totally and completely screwed them up. (Well, maybe he did, and it weighs on his conscience, but sometimes he's got so much weighing on him that it all blends in to one massive monolithic bad deed that threatens to drive him insane.)

He can't stop thinking about Amy, and her face, contorted with pain when she made the decision to get sent back with Rory. In his mind, there's a little bit of hesitation in her step and her voice as she turned to say goodbye to him that one last time, as if she wasn't totally sure whether she was going back to her husband or travelling with him. (The only place for Amy Pond in his mind is in the TARDIS with him, but clearly, he's quite wrong about that.)

The better angel of his nature tells him that she loved him, yes, but not in the same way that she loved Rory, and that's entirely and totally okay. She made her decision, and he ought to be happy about that and continue with doing what he always does – saving the world.

He cannot convince himself of that, because in his heart, he's selfish. He wanted Amy for himself and only himself, despite the fact that it would never actually happen, because he loved her, loved her more than the husband who wanted to make her settle down, and who walked out on her when he discovered that she couldn't bear children. No, he could have shown her the stars and taken her anywhere and everywhere she wanted to go.

He walks past the room with the bunk beds and debates taking the whole set and chucking it in to a black hole. He is stuck at an existential crossroad (and this is why he needs to keep travelling and running) where some days, he feels like eradicating all reference to Amy from his life, and on others, he wants to preserve all of it as if there's a chance it could bring her back to life in some twisted way.

The other reason that he isn't travelling much is that the TARDIS is acting up. He's stuck hovering above earth, and also stuck in prehistoric times without the slightest clue as to how he got there. The continents are all stuck together, and when he watches superstorms erupt on Pangaea they match the ones within him.

He fiddles with everything that's wise for him to fiddle with, but she has firmly decided that they aren't going anywhere at all, and she's always decided that she has a mind of her own.

He kicks the console in frustration, and then jumps in the pool with all of his clothes on, hoping to drown, but he has become too human and pushes up from the bottom at the last minute. (Damn those survival instincts.) As he lays his clothes out to dry, he also realises that drowning himself wouldn't have done anything – he'd just regenerate, and leave another poor soul with all of his memories. That'd be incredibly and exceptionally cruel.

One day (well, it's day over the ocean, but night for whatever life's on Pangaea, or most of it) the TARDIS comes back to life in a rather spectacular fashion. She lurches hard to the left, almost so hard that he's thrown out (never sitting with his feet dangling out ever again, because now he knows that that can happen). Suddenly she starts flying through the years faster than he knew she ever could, which freaks him out immensely. He tries to fiddle with the switches and levers on the console, but to no avail – she is going where she wants to go, and that is going to be that. He decides that if he can't control where she's going to go, he might as well watch, so he peeks out the window and observes the continents split, and gets far too close to a massive asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs (and the Silurians too, he realises with regret), and then sees a cloud of dust consume the earth and then disappear, and Africa separate from South America and the continents take their present order, and then after a bit where nothing really happens, the TARDIS starts going towards Earth at a frightening speed.

He is thrown off of his feet, and now he's just mad.  
"Excuse me," he yells, "if you felt like not trying to kill me any more, that'd be wonderful!"

He manages to get up on his feet and sees them zip across Africa, and then north over Europe and finally back over Britain.

"Oh, don't take me to Leadworth, please don't," he shouts at the console. "I can't explain this to Brian, or Aunt Sharon, or anyone. Please, please don't."

He nearly takes one of the clock hands off Big Ben (again!) but the TARDIS presses on in a generally northward direction, he guesses.

Up until they're over Edinburgh, they maintain a decent altitude, but she stops with a lurch over a block of flats not far from the city centre.

"What are doing?" He yells at the console as he tries to get up. "You and I need to have a serious –"

She drops straight down, and owing to gravity, which is as heartless as ever, he is pressed against the floor. He prays that they don't hit someone's flat, because that's going to attract far more attention than he really needs.

"Is this how you're going to introduce me to a new companion?" He yells as they fall. "This, by the way, is totally the wrong way to go about it, if you were wondering!"

The TARDIS swerves, which he suspects is the only way they don't render an innocent citizen of the city of Edinburgh homeless, and then plops in to someone's flower bed.

He hits his head on the console during the fall, and when he regains consciousness, someone is banging on the TARDIS doors. He straightens his tie, stands up, and opens the door. He nearly faints again when he sees who's looking back at him.

"That's two back gardens of mine that you've ruined, Raggedy Man," Amy says with a smile. "You're going to have to come in for tea to make it up to me."


	3. Chapter 3

He sits down in the small dining room while she fixes them some tea and biscuits in the kitchen. Amy can peek out the doorway and look at him, and she sees that he's staring at a picture of the TARDIS that she'd drawn and framed and put up on the wall.

She digs out the package of Jammie Dodger-like cookies that she had purchased on a whim and kept in her cupboard for no particular reason and lays them out on a plate. (That's not true. Some small part of her heart told her that there was an infinitesimal chance that he'd find her again, in which case, he'd want his Jammie Dodgers.)

She puts their two cups of tea and the biscuits on a tray, and brings them out to the table.

"Earl Grey," she says, sitting down across from him.

"Rory's got a new favourite, then," he says, staring intently in to his tea. "You were never an Earl Grey drinker, and neither was he, if I remember correctly."

She shakes her head. "He doesn't, as far as I know." She shrugs. "Haven't seen him in three years, so I really couldn't tell you."

"What?" The Doctor looks at her in shock, and she figures that he's been living on whatever River's told him and whatever he deduced from the gravestone at Winter Quay, so his reaction makes sense. "Where's he gone? Is he coming back soon?"

She shakes her head. "He's in New York, Doctor, but about eight years in the past."

"How?"

"As I understand it, there's no guarantee that the Weeping Angels send their victims back to the same place," she says, matter-of-factly, because there really is no better way to explain it. Plus, she's been over the story so many times in her head that it's no longer new and shocking her. "I ended up on the shores of Loch Ness in 1946."

"And Rory got sent back to New York," the Doctor says, nodding.

"But about eight years earlier," she says. "He married another woman named Amelia. Last I heard from River, and that's about three years ago, they were having a child. Well, he or she's definitely been born by now if all's gone well."

The Doctor is staring at her with his mouth open.

"She was the Amelia Williams on the gravestone in Winter Quay."

"Oh."

"And the entire afterword," Amy continues, "is as much of a work of fiction as the rest of the novel is. River wrote it in my name."

The Doctor puts down his tea and puts his head in his hands. "Why would she do something like that?"

"She thought it was kinder, I suppose," she says. "I still don't really know how she found me, but she did, and she filled me in on everything that had happened. I think she thought I'd died or something, when in fact, the reality was a bit more mundane."

He doesn't say anything for a while, and neither does she, until the silence between them becomes too heavy and awkward for her not to break it.

"I lived with a couple called Jane and Hugh in Inverness for a year or so," she says, "because I thought that Rory was going to come find me. They gave me this place to live, because eventually it became apparent that Rory wasn't coming back. So I came here, and that's how I ended up living in post-war Edinburgh. I write books for a living. Children's books based on adventures that you and I had. My next one's all about pirates."

He's still stuck in shocked silence, and then she figures that he'll snap out of it in his own time.

"Anyways," she says, collecting their teacups and the untouched plate of biscuits, "I've got a meeting with the publisher tomorrow morning, and it's quite late, so I've got to go to bed. There's a spare bedroom across the hall from mine. Bed's all made up." She laughs a little to herself, and then continues, "I anticipate guests who never seem to arrive. You really ought to crash into my garden at a more convenient time, Doctor." She gets up and puts their things in the kitchen.

She can't get to sleep for ages and ages, because he's back. She doesn't know whether River might have given him a clue, but based on how stupefied he was when she appeared, she thinks that it was probably the TARDIS, dragging him away from his grief-imposed exile and bringing him to her. (Good old Idris. She missed the old girl.)

She can't fathom why she isn't reacting with more surprise to his sudden reappearance – but there's that little bit of her imagination that sort of knew that he could and would find a way back to her if there was one. There aren't any Daleks in Edinburgh that she knows of, or Weeping Angels or any other galactic threat here that would ordinarily drive him to land in her back garden. It's just like the time when he landed (will land?) in her garden fifty-two years in the future – it was simply chance or fate.

The thought intrigues her, because she had never thought about why exactly the TARDIS chose to land in her garden out of the millions of gardens in the world, and she assumes that the TARDIS has some sense of destiny, so maybe it knew that Amy and the Doctor would eventually become irrevocably tied up with each other.

(She knows that he's gone to bed because he snores a little, and he leaves the door to his room open and he wakes her up two hours before her alarm was meant to. She isn't sure what to leave him for breakfast, so she puts the plate of biscuits on the table before she leaves for the day.)

* * *

Gallifreyans can go for some time without sleep, but before he'd crashed landed at Amy's flat, he had very seriously pushed those limits. When he'd finally been able to go to sleep in the bed across from Amy's room, he slept like the dead. (Not that he would know what being dead felt like at all, but deep, dreamless sleeps is what he imagines death to be most like.)

She's gone when he wakes up, which frightens him a little, because now that he's over the shock of her not being dead or stuck in an unsolvable paradox, he wants to hold on to her tightly and not let her go again. He suddenly remembers that she had told him that she had a meeting in the morning, and his panic subsides a bit. He wanders in to the kitchen where she's left him a note.

_Doctor, _

_I'm fresh out of food, but I'll do some shopping on the way home. These are the cookies most like Jammie Dodgers that I could find, so perhaps you could subsist on these for the day. I'll do the shopping on my way back from my meeting today. I don't know how long it will be – they sure can talk, those publishers can._

_Amy _

He turns the radio on, sits in the living room, and eats all the Jammie Dodgers on the plate that she left out.

Around noon, by which point he's eaten the entire package of biscuits, there's knock on the door. He tries to ignore it and continues to read a copy of _Summer Falls _(quite engrossing, though that doesn't surprise him), but then the someone starts yelling.

"Amelia! I know you're in there, so come open the door or I'll break it down!"

The person on the other side of the door sounds old, so he seriously doubts that she'd be able to. He doesn't want to take any risks, so he opens it, and finds that it's an older neighbour of Amy's, who reacts with shock when she sees the Doctor.

"I didn't know that Amelia was married," she says.

He's scrambling a bit for what to do, because he doesn't want to get Amy in trouble, so he decides to take his accent faking ability out for a ride.

"Yes," he says, "well, she isn't, but perhaps those Ponds are hoping that something might happen this weekend. I'm a friend of her cousin's from Newcastle." He smiles and nods and hopes like hell that he's being convincing.

"I didn't know that Miss Pond," she says, emphasis on the _miss, _"had any family."

"She obviously doesn't mention us much."

The old woman gives him a dubious look. That's the thing about elderly humans – they can either be terrifying or wonderful, and this one clearly falls in to the terrifying category.

"John Smith," he says, extending his hand, but she does not shake it.

"Is that your thing in the garden?" she asks.

He shakes his head, and then realises that he really ought to move the TARDIS somewhere else. "I don't know who in the blazes would land a police box in the garden."

The old lady harrumphs, and crosses her arms. "Perhaps a strapping young man like yourself might be able to clean it up."

He nods.

"Good day, Mr. Smith," she says, and walks away.

He waits until her footsteps subside, and then dashes out of Amy's flat, in to the garden, and in to the TARDIS.

"Alright, Sexy, let's see how good my aim is," he says, and he fires her up again.

* * *

The Doctor is gone when Amy finally gets back to her flat in the late afternoon, arms full of bags of groceries.

"Doctor!" she yells. "I'm home!"

There is no response.

She peeks in his bedroom, and in the kitchen, and then out the window, then notices with horror that the TARDIS isn't in the back garden anymore. Her mind starts to spin, and she is furious with herself and wishes that she'd sent him away when he landed in the garden the night before. She was a fool for letting him back in to her life in the first place, because that's what he does – he leaves.

She then hears a familiar sound behind her, and for a moment she can't place it, and then she realises – it's the TARDIS materialising.

In her living room.

He aimed right for once.


End file.
